Youth Culture and the Media

Global Perspectives

Bill Osgerby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351065245
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This expansive, lively introduction charts the connections between international youth cultures and the development of global media and communication.

From 1950s drive-ins and jukeboxes to contemporary social media, the book examines modern youth cultures in their social, economic, and political contexts. Exploring the rise of young people as a distinct media market, the book examines the relation of youth to modern consumerism, marketing, and digital technologies. The chapters are packed with analysis of media representations of youth, debates about the media's 'effects' on young audiences, and young people's use of the media to elaborate identities and negotiate social relationships. Drawing on a wealth of international examples, the book explores the impact of globalisation and new media technologies on youth cultures around the world. Assessing a profusion of worldwide research, the book shows how modern youth cultures can only be understood as part of an international web of connections, exchanges, and experiences.

With an ideal balance between detailed examples and engaging analysis, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in youth cultures and the modern media.

1 Introduction

Youth culture and the media: global perspectives

Youth culture, the media, and ‘seismic’ social change

‘Youthquake’ was a hot phrase in 2017 when it was chosen as ‘word of the year’ by Oxford Dictionaries (the dictionary branch of Oxford University Press). Defined as ‘a significant cultural, political or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people’, ‘youthquake’ was selected partly for its prevalence. The term had been widely used by the British media to describe a surge in young people’s support for the political opposition during the 2017 general election. But the term’s pertinence had also influenced the Oxford lexicographers. As the head of Oxford Dictionaries explained, ‘youthquake’ had been chosen because, during a ‘difficult and divisive year’, it was ‘a rare political word that sounds a hopeful note’ (quoted in Cain, 2017). But the term could equally describe the more general impact young people and their cultures have had, since the early twentieth century, on patterns of social, economic, and political change around the world.

Indeed, 2017 was not the first time commentators had used the term ‘youthquake’ to describe the way young people seemed to be a driving force in ‘seismic’ social change. In 1965 Diana Vreeland – the editor-in-chief of fashion magazine Vogue – had originally used the phrase in an editorial that trumpeted the way youngsters seemed to be reconfiguring the world’s cultural landscape:

Youth … is surprising countries east and west with a sense of assurance serene beyond all years … under 24 and over 90,000,000 strong in the US alone. More dreamers. More doers. Here. Now. Youthquake, 1965.

(Vreeland, 1965: 112)

And, two years later, Look – the American features magazine – used the term as the title for a special volume chronicling young people’s prominence in tumultuous times. As the book’s promotional blurb explained, youth seemed to be key protagonists in events that had shaken up US society:

This is their age – the age of the teeny-bopper and the long hair, of the Peace Corps worker and the peace marcher, of the mod and the mini, of the under 25er.

(Look, 1967)

Outside America the same theme also surfaced. In Britain, for example, the 1970s saw an array of cultural commentators use the phrase ‘youthquake’ to denote the way young people had been central to the shifts transforming British society since the Second World War. According to Richard Neville, a ‘youthquake’ had divided the country into two generational ‘armed camps’ (1970: 13), while Peter Lewis argued Britain had been the epicentre of an ‘explosive discovery of teenage identity’ (Lewis, 1978: 118), and Kenneth Leech observed how a ‘youthquake’ had transformed the 1950s into ‘supremely the decade of the teenager’ (1973: 1).

More recent ‘youthquakes’ have also registered on the Richter scale of worldwide change. In 2003, for instance, the term was emblazoned across the cover of Egypt Today, as the English-language Egyptian magazine spotlighted the way the nation’s youngsters were ‘rocking the world of movies, music and TV’ (November 2003). And in 2018 US futurologist Rocky Scopelliti used the term ‘youthquake’ for the title of his account of the way a new industrial era was being globally forged through a confluence of demographic change and technological development. For Scopelliti, the world’s growing youth population was at the cutting edge of the technological advancements transforming every facet of social life – a position, Scopelliti argued, made explicit by young people’s immersion in the realms of digital media and communications:

… their voice and influence is global through the social media they continue to fuel. It’s instantly delivered to their smartphones, and that’s become as natural to them as the air they breathe, efficiently consumed through the artificially intelligent, personalised, platform-based, exponential models serving them.

(2018: 6)

Scopelliti’s views exemplify the way youth have invariably been configured as the vanguard of technological change and, especially, the emergence of new forms of media and communications. And, undoubtedly, young people have played a key role in the proliferation of digital media in the early twenty-first century. Most obviously, youth has been a key market for the new forms of communication and entertainment unleashed by digital technologies, but young people have also been in the forefront of the way these technologies are used for new forms of cultural expression and self-representation. Symbolic configurations of youth, moreover, have invariably figured in the way the media itself has interpreted these changes, with young people represented as both the epitome of the social benefits afforded by technological innovation, and the embodiment of their malignant consequences. These relationships between youth and the media, however, are not unique to the age of digital communication. As this book demonstrates, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, close connections have existed between developments in youth culture and changes in the fields of media and communication.

Primarily, this book explores the complex relationships that exist in the production, circulation, and consumption of media and cultural texts geared towards markets and audiences of young people. It analyses the historical development and contemporary configuration of the commercial youth market, highlighting its relation to both the broader development of modern media institutions and to wider shifts in social, economic, and political relations. Attention is given to the impact of increasing conglomeration in the media industries, the shift towards niche marketing and the growing importance of ‘cultural intermediaries’ in modern business practice. But consideration is also given to youth’s relationship with the media and the various ways young people make commercial texts and products ‘meaningful’. Recognition is given to young people’s ability to be ‘active consumers’ who create their own identities through their practices of consumption, but issues of institutional power, control, and inequality are also stressed. Generally, emphasis is placed on the way cultural meanings are always dynamic – continually formed and reformed as they circulate through (and feed back into) the various sites of production, representation, and consumption.

As well as exploring the symbiotic relationships that exist between young people’s cultural formations and commercial industries, this book also analyses media representations of young people and the way configurations of ‘youth’ have featured within wider media and political discourse. Here, attention is given to the various ways the media have constructed ‘ideologies of youth’ through the deployment of specific representational codes and modes of address. The constitution of ideologically-charged representations of youth, it is argued, has functioned as an important medium through which fundamental shifts in social boundaries and cultural relationships have been historically explored, made sense of and interpreted – not only by the media, but also by legislators, institutions of social control and a wide spectrum of cultural commentators.

The book also seeks to place these issues within a ‘global’ context. In a world characterised by growing social, economic, and political connections, local youth cultures cannot be understood in isolation but only as part of an international web of connections, exchanges, and experiences. As David Buckingham and Mary Jane Kehily explain, the early twenty-first century has seen many young people’s lives transformed by the forces of globalisation:

Young people are now growing up with significantly greater access to globalized media: media companies are increasingly constructing and targeting global markets, and young people are using new media to form and sustain transnational connections. Growing numbers of them have also experienced global migration, and inhabit communities in which a wide range of global cultures mix and cross-fertilize.

(Buckingham and Kehily, 2014: 8–9)

The flows of globalisation, however, have not subsumed differences between the experiences and expressions of young people around the world. Indeed, rather than speaking of youth culture (singular), it is probably more accurate to think in terms of youth cultures (plural), and this book highlights the way local histories and circumstances still play a crucial role in defining and determining young people’s lives. At the same time, however, local experiences are embedded in international networks of interaction and influence, and so this book stresses the way global perspectives are essential for understanding the relationships between youth culture(s) and the media.

‘“Anywhere, anytime” connectivity’: media and communication in young people’s lives

It has become something of a cliché to observe that contemporary youngsters are immersed in the media. Nevertheless, the media clearly play a major part in young people’s lives. The TV shows they watch, the music they listen to, the video games they play, the websites they visit, and the social networks they use; all of them offer young people a stream of different experiences, ideas, and knowledge. And, year on year, surveys attest to the significant amount of time young people spend engaging with media technologies and content. For example, in their 2019 survey of US youngsters’ media use, the independent research agency Common Sense Media found that teenagers aged between 13 and 18 spent an average of over 7 hours a day using screen media of some kind.¹ And, while teenagers were watching half an hour less of shows on a TV set than they did in 2015, the numbers watching online videos ‘every day’ had more than doubled – from 34 per cent in 2015 to 69 per cent in 2019 – and the amount time spent watching online material had risen from half an hour a day to about an hour (Rideout and Robb, 2019: 3). And, while the amount of time spent using social media had remained fairly steady across the four-year period, it still accounted for over an hour of the average teenager’s day (Rideout and Robb, 2019: 6). One of the most noticeable shifts was the way smartphone ownership among 13–18-year-olds had grown substantially since 2015, increasing from 67 per cent to 84 per cent in 2019 (Rideout and Robb, 2019: 5). The trend testified to the way mobile phones had become deeply embedded in the daily lives of most American teenagers, a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center finding that 42 per cent of US teens reported feeling ‘anxious’ when they did not have their phones, while around a quarter said they felt lonely (25 per cent) or upset (24 per cent) (Anderson and Jiang, 2018: 6).

European research also testified to the omnipresence of media in young people’s lives. In 2018, for example, Rinaldo Kühne and Susanne Baumgartner reported that German adolescents watched television for an average of 105 minutes and listened to radio for 79 minutes every day, while they spent an average of around 200 minutes a day online (Kühne and Baumgartner, 2018: 8). In Britain, meanwhile, the Office of Communications (Ofcom – the body responsible for regulating broadcasting) reported that in 2016 young people aged between 16 and 24 were the country’s most active media and communications users. On average, members of this group spent nearly 9 hours a day using various forms of media and communications. Furthermore, through multi-tasking (using several media forms at the same time), Ofcom estimated the youngsters crammed just over 13 hours’ worth of media and communications activity into their daily routine (Ofcom, 2016: 20–21). And in 2020 the multinational research network EU Kids Online reported that, while there was variation across the 19 European countries it surveyed, media and communications usage was deep-rooted in young people’s lives. Compared to 2010, the study found, the amount of time youngsters spent online each day had almost doubled in many countries – for example, from about one to three hours per day in Spain, and from about two to three-and-a-half hours in Norway (Smahel et al., 2020: 6). Smartphones, moreover, were ‘always at hand, providing an “anywhere, anytime” connectivity’, the majority of youngsters surveyed reporting they used their smartphones almost all the time, several times each day or at least daily – although this ranged between 65 per cent (France) and 89 per cent (Lithuania) (Smahel et al., 2020: 6).

Media and communication, therefore, occupy a central place in young people’s social and cultural lives. Moreover, the wealth of research undertaken on youth’s relationship with the media demonstrates the way young people are seen as being separate and distinct from the wider, ‘adult’ world, and are considered a focus for particular issues and concerns. Across the variety of international studies, however, ‘youth’ is bracketed as an age group in diverse ways. This testifies to the way the period in the life course encompassed by the term ‘youth’ has varied significantly between different societies. Indeed, while the United Nations defines ‘youth’ as ‘those persons between the ages of 15 and 24 years’, it acknowledges there ‘is no universally agreed international definition of the youth age group’ (United Nations, nd). While ‘youth’ is generally conceived as a period of semi-dependence that divides the full dependency of childhood and the complete independence of adulthood, its precise boundaries are relative and contingent.

The developing concepts of ‘youth’ and ‘youth culture’

‘Youth’, therefore, is not an inherent period in the life course, but is a social construct; an age category created through the interaction of social, economic, and political forces. Of course, the experience of aging is a fundamental biological process and the physical transformations associated with puberty represent a tangible moment of transition from childhood to mature adulthood. But the social characteristics ascribed to the generational category labelled ‘youth’ have varied between different historical and cultural contexts. As David Sibley has argued, the boundary separating childhood and adulthood is imprecise and ‘the act of drawing the line in the construction of discrete [age] categories interrupts what is naturally continuous’ (Sibley, 1995: 35). Rather than being a consistent and unvarying stage in human physical and psychological development, therefore, the distinguishing features of ‘youth’ are the product of wider judgments made by specific societies. As Walter Heinz explains:

The coordinates of this period of life vary according to the economy and the educational and social policies of the state: the life course and its component ‘youth’ are path-dependent social structures. Modern societies differ in their institutional arrangements concerning life transitions: education and training provisions, labour market regulations, exclusion mechanisms, social assistance rules, and the extent to which there is an explicit youth policy.

(Heinz, 2009: 6)

The precise demarcations of ‘youth’ as an age group vary considerably, but a general concept of ‘youth’ as a period of life dividing childhood and adulthood first became established in Europe and North America during the late nineteenth century. According to John Gillis (1974), this period saw modern notions of youth delineated as a consequence of a growing apprehension among legislators and reformers that the teenage years were a life stage distinguished by social and psychological vulnerability. As a result, there ensued a flood of protective legislation which – coupled with a new range of specialised welfare bodies and employment practices – marked out youth as a distinct social group associated with particular needs and social problems. Claire Wallace and Sijka Kovatcheva (1998) also see processes of industrialisation and the development of state agencies as central factors in the emergence of youth as a clearly defined stage in the life course. For Wallace and Kovatcheva, concepts of youth developed as a facet of Western modernity and ‘the development of the modern world associated with professional bureaucratic power, industrial society and enlightenment rationality’ (1998: 10). From this perspective, the modern configuration of distinct age groups was the product of state bureaucracies, who developed age as a precise method of calibration in administrative practices that worked to define and control subordinate populations, an institutional formalisation of life stages that reached a high point with the expansion of state welfare and education systems after the Second World War.²

Modern notions of ‘youth’ as a discrete life stage demanding special attention and supervision were particularly associated with the concept of ‘adolescence’ developed in psychology and pedagogy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Studies such as G. Stanley Hall’s rambling opus, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime and Education (1904) popularised the notion of adolescence as a distinct phase of bio‑psychological transformation that began with puberty and ended in mature adulthood. Hall’s view of adolescence as an innately volatile period of identity formation (inevitably troubling for both young people and wider society) retains influence in branches of psychology. More generally, however, this approach fell from favour during the mid-twentieth century as empirical investigation cast doubt on notions of adolescence as an intrinsically traumatic phase of personal development.³ In place of inherent bio-psychological characteristics, theorists increasingly focused on the social characteristics that were believed to set youth apart as a discrete social group. During the early 1940s, for instance, the American sociologist Talcott Parsons coined the term ‘youth culture’ to denote what he saw as a distinct generational cohort subject to common processes of socialisation. For Parsons, this ‘youth culture’ was a transitionary experience that performed a positive function for the social whole by ‘easing the difficult process of adjustment from childhood emotional dependency to full “maturity”’ (Parsons, 1943: 30).

Other American researchers also contributed to the developing theories of youth as a distinctive life stage. In Childhood and Society (1950), for example, Erik Erikson presented adolescence as a confusing (though not especially deviant) phase of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: youth culture and the media: global perspectives
• 2 The rise of the teenage media market: youth, consumption, and entertainment in the twentieth century
• 3 Millennials and the media: youth, communication, and consumption in the early twenty-first century
• 4 Media representations of youth: pathologies, panaceas, and moral panics
• 5 Media effects and youth: a crucible of controversy
• 6 Young people and media consumption: from mass culture to subcultures, ‘resistance’ … and beyond
• 7 Media industries, globalisation, and the international youth market
• 8 Global media, local youth cultures, and hybridity
• 9 Youth culture, identity, and creativity in the age of digital media
• 10 Conclusion: youth, media, and ‘circuits of culture’
• References
• Index